It's Okay to Laugh (16 page)

FANTASY SCENARIOS FOR THE CHRONICALLY LONELY

You and your partner, on the couch, watching a
Game of Thrones
marathon. He turns to you and calls you his Khaleesi. You both ignore that Khal Drogo had a really fucked-up death.

A man wearing a wedding ring, a little symbol that he is proud to belong to somebody.

You see two people walking down the street holding hands. Their steps fall in perfect unison without their even trying.

A couple is sitting in a crowded restaurant having a face-to-face conversation. They laugh and order dessert. They never pick up their phones.

Your lady friend is picking up takeout on the way home because she knows you have to work late and she wants you to have one less thing to worry about.

Your boyfriend plays with the ends of your hair while you watch a movie. The movie is whatever you wanted to watch.

You can't decide between the burger or the Caesar salad. You get the salad but your partner gets the burger. “We'll split them!” you say. You eat a third of his burger and most of his fries and all of your salad.

Your wife, lying next to you in bed, reading while wearing the retainer she got in eighth grade.

Your partner buys concert tickets for both of you without even asking if you want to see the show. You're not crazy about the band, but you go anyway.

It's garbage day and your husband said he'd take the garbage out last night, but he didn't, so it's still in the driveway and now you have to wait until next week. You send him a passive-aggressive “what day is garbage?” text before you leave for work. You know what day garbage is.

Your girlfriend texts to ask if you guys need dental floss, because she's at Target and could pick some up.

Your husband makes dinner, feeds the baby, cleans up the entire kitchen, and puts the kids to bed while you paint your nails and watch
Gilmore Girls
reruns.

You and your friends are standing in the back of a concert talking and your boyfriend gets each of you a beer on his way back from the bathroom.

You ask your wife what she wants for dinner. She says, “I don't know, probably just a bowl of cereal?” And you sit on the couch crushing a box of Lucky Charms together because you are adults.

You look fly as hell and your partner takes your photo for Instagram so you don't need to post a mirror selfie.

The baby is up at 7:00
A.M
. on a Saturday, which is rude because you have a hangover. Your partner says, “I'll get him. You keep sleeping.”

Your boyfriend left the cap off the toothpaste again. You're like, “Dude, you
need
to put the cap on the toothpaste! It's all dried out now!” And throw it dramatically in the garbage. He apologizes.

You check your phone in the middle of the workday. Your person has sent you a text. He wants to know how your day is. He's just taking a second to say hello to his person, and his person is you.

WARNING: This whole part is about sex so if you are related to me, you'll probably want to skip it. If this sounds prudish, that's because I guess I'm still a bit of a prude. Once I thought I heard my dad making sex noises at night, and when I brought it up, indignantly, to my mother the next morning, I was relieved to find out he was having Vietnam flashbacks in his sleep. There are a lot of things wrong with that, I know.

I started dreaming about sex the month after Aaron died, waking up hot and lonely and very uncomfortable about the things I'd dreamed of doing with the guy from the food co-op who always sighs with disappointment when I say no, I am not a member, before he swipes my credit card. A little guilty, too, to be so corporeal, so tied up in my living body that I could find the time to feel something like that when Aaron's death is so fresh. But I felt
it. I feel it all the time. Even though my battered heart is barely beating, even though I've got no capacity to possibly add another human to the list of people I love, my body is craving connection.

“Well, I'm on Match.com,” I started telling my friends, around the same time. Not because I was, but because I wanted to see their reactions. They were all the same: the same uncomfortable smiles and nods, the same high-pitched “Okay! Good for you!” and the same relieved laughter when I told them I was joking.

But I don't know why exactly I'm saying that as a joke. It's not particularly funny, and it's not particularly outlandish. I mean, I'm thirty-two. I haven't had sex for the last time. Right?

When Aaron was still alive, one of my first widow friends texted me to say that she had started online dating.

“Good for you!” I texted, but inside I recoiled in horror. It had been four months since her husband died.
Four months.
Surely, I thought, wrapping my arms around my living husband's ever-diminishing waist, it takes longer than that to heal from such a loss.

And yep, it does.

But we're not talking about healing. And we're not talking about falling in love. We're talking about sex. Or, like, honestly, at this point, just hugging or kissing. Or just someone to play with my hair. Or even someone who would just put his hand on the small of my back while we're walking into a restaurant. Also, someone to pay for dinner and listen to my stories and laugh wholeheartedly and tell me that I'm funny. Also, somebody who doesn't know me and pity me, the poor widowed mother, who has just
been through so much
.

I am a thirty-two-year-old woman who has not been touched by a man in many months. I have not gone this long without male contact since losing my virginity, which I held on to for nearly twenty years, to the horror of my high school self, who had promised to wait until marriage, though what the hell did that girl know? She
pierced her belly button as a direct result of seeing Britney Spears with a belly ring on
Total Request Live.

Anyway, it has been a while and I am finding my hunger is coming out in new ways. I sometimes hug my male friends a little too long. The other day, a CrossFit coach gently brushed my shoulder while adjusting my form and I swear I had an orgasm.

I. Am. Lonely.

I've been alone—and lonely—before, though they aren't the same thing.

Taylor Swift is alone. Well, actually, she just started seeing Calvin Harris and I'm weirdly jealous, like we'd both agreed to go to prom alone and then she showed up with a date or something. But even when Taylor is alone, she's not
lonely
. She's amassing a huge collection of supermodel best friends and baking pies and making hits. And that's what I'm doing, basically! Except it's more like parenting a child and buying gluten-free cookies and watching
Scandal
on Hulu on the couch with my friends. And except that I want my own Calvin Harris. At least for a night or two.

At four months of widowhood, my friends understand. Or some of them do. The more prudish ones, who, like me, probably leave the room during sex scenes when they're watching movies with their family, are uncomfortable with my need. “Nora,” they say about my desire to casually kiss a man, a fairly innocent affair by even the most prudish of standards, “it will just be like junk food. Totally empty calories and completely unsatisfying.” These are people who have never been this kind of lonely. And who probably don't eat pints of gelato for dinner.

This is not a normal kind of lonely. This is a new brand of loneliness for me. I am lonely the way any person without a partner is lonely, the way that old men buying only canned soup and Oreo cookies in grocery stores are lonely. It's being lonely for the
marriage we had and the life we shared together, where I got to text “On my way” when I left the office and had someone to send me new pop sensations before they hit the radio. It's a loneliness for the simple feeling of belonging to someone, or having that person belong to me, like the rings we wore on our left hands, a little signal to the world that we were someone's person.

I am a really fun person to be around right now, as you can imagine.

I want an out, I want a lifeline. I want that lifeline to be a very handsome stranger who thinks I am very cool and basically loves me but knows I am a loner and a rebel right now, someone who wants into the little clubhouse I've built with Ralph but understands that he must wait to be invited before crossing the threshold, like a vampire.

I want someone who is kind and loving, but won't love me, or expect me to love him. Just someone who thinks I am fantastic and wants to kiss me and maybe hug me, who respects me but also doesn't want anything from me. I basically want a male escort who only kisses and also assembles IKEA furniture and kills spiders.

It's been over four years since I've been on a date, and I'm finding, like people find out when they're released from prison after thirty years, that the world has changed. There are electric cars! Nobody says “raise the roof” anymore! We can shop for humans using our cell phones!

I'm not sure if the “game” ever involved recent widows just seeking a person to physically touch them without expecting a relationship or even sex, but the closest thing I can find to such a request that doesn't involve the risk of becoming a Craigslist-killer victim is, I guess, Tinder.

For those of you who have never had to use Tinder because you've been in a happy adult relationship since before 2014, GOOD
FOR YOU, TREASURE THE PERSON WHO LOVES YOU FOR SAVING YOU FROM THIS HELL. Also, here is how it works: You're served up some people who are currently in proximity to you and also fit the gender you're seeking. If you like them, based on their photos and bio, you swipe right. If you don't, you swipe left. If you both like each other, you can send a message, eventually meeting in person and kissing on the lips if you would like to.

Tinder is allegedly more anonymous than other dating apps because there's no profile for people to search. I'm not on those ones because it doesn't feel right to put myself in a dating pool where boys from high school may be fishing for their second wife. No, I need something with the reputation of a hook-up site, even if what I'm looking for is decidedly PG.

I don't want to run the risk of being matched with anyone I know, so I decide to test the waters when I'm visiting the Bay area for a few weeks to work on this book. Surely I'll be able to find someone tall, nerdy, and looking for a no-strings-attached above-the-belt-only fling with a recent widow. Right?

First things first, I need a bio. Something to the point, but intriguing.

           
NORA, 32.

           
About Nora:

           
A cool widow who kind of wants to kiss someone.

               
In the Bay Area for a few weeks, hanging out and writing a book (
BRAG
). I am very tall (6'), and I also have a toddler who you won't ever meet because I'm not a crazy person. I just want to be around a live adult male and maybe kiss him.
MAYBE.

I always include my height in any description of myself, because I'm incredibly tall for any human, but especially for a woman, and I want people to be prepared for what they're going to encounter. I
personally don't care anymore when complete strangers do double takes when spotting me in the wild, or men I've never met insist on going back-to-back to see who is taller (me, always). I just want to spare fragile males the discomfort of trying to explain to me that they are six feet tall and I must be taller than I think I am.

Once my profile is up, I can start shopping. There's not actually information about how tall a person is, and most men seem to be completely inept at choosing appealing photos of themselves that don't include other people's children or a fish they caught.

I'm trying to be open-minded, but it's really hard to discern whether someone has the qualities I'm looking for from just a few blurry photos and a few lines of copy where they indicate that they are, like every other man on Tinder, a nice guy who likes to eat food and do stuff.

Finally, I get a message.

           
Hello Nora and welcome to the Bay Area! I loved your description!

                
I share the same feeling of being around an adult woman and laugh and laugh and be serious and laugh again

                
And eventually kiss.

                
I know the toddler feeling as well.

I'm not sure what to do with this conversation, so I let it sit there in my inbox and hope this guy moves on to another adult woman who can laugh and be serious and laugh again. I do, however, wonder about his toddler feeling.

My second suitor pops up a day later.

           
There
'
s no way this is a real profile, but I at least want the name of the model you stole these photos from ;-)

I halfheartedly consider a few witty responses, but can't bring myself to reply. I don't know how I expected this to work, but this
isn't it. I've heard Tinder described as the gamification of dating, but I don't really get that, because it's a boring-ass game. Swipe left, swipe right, and perhaps you will get a semi-literate message from a stranger with a few grainy photos! I'd rather just make eye contact with a bunch of strangers and then stalk through Craigslist “Missed Connections” looking for a description of a tall blonde with eyes like a starved wolf. I find the gear icon in the upper right-hand side of my screen and delete my profile.

It's been four months since Aaron died. That same widow friend I mentioned is still single, having found that the gnawing loneliness she was trying to satisfy won't be filled by someone served to us by an algorithm and a smartphone, won't be filled by sex at all.

This isn't something that you get over, it's just a gaping wound that I will learn to live with. Someday, I know, I will meet a man and I will love him. He will love me back, even though I never fully replace the caps on full containers of salad dressing or Tylenol. Even though I pee with the door a little bit open because I am lazy and even though I can't watch anything suspenseful without providing a running commentary for the sake of my own stress relief. I'll love him for all his weirdo traits, too, but I'll love him around the hole that Aaron left. Some spaces are not meant to be filled.